Trench
by WingLancir
Summary: Crowley remembers the trenches. Oh noes, historical musing. WW!Crowley, slight CA


Not mine. Terry and Gaiman rule the world.

* * *

Crowley remembers the trenches.

Mud, rats, sludge of blood and gore and earth that would never be clean again. Barbed wire and rain. Acrid air that burned in the lungs like fire.

Black smoke that stung your eyes. Green and yellow smoke that did worse, drifting silently over still twitching bodies. Earth that heaved and collapsed, and dirt flung everywhere by the explosions, raining on your helmet, in your eyes, in your clothes, mud in your mouth and down your throat and it was the taste of death.

It was not the first horrific war in human history. Crowley knew that. He was there for many of the others. And it will not be the last, either, and he knew that as well.

The young generations forget. That was the way of human memory. Oh, they could read and research about it, have the numbers and casualty statistics pasted into their heads during school, watch the old black and white films and stare blankly at the smiling, waving young men and the surreal vista of blank ground. No man's land. It doesn't look the right way through a camera lense. Silent film can't capture the ringing in the ear drums after the shells exploded. Even new technology can't recreate the raw whistle of incoming fire, and what it sounded like when the bullets fed in and the machine guns began spitting.

The names are infamous, now, rather than chilling. Verdun. The Somme River. The Western Front is its own culture, its own slice of time, like some kind of bubble reality that exists outside the rest of the world. They can't remember how it was the place you, and your mates, and your brothers and your father and their brothers and fathers, were sent to. Or the place you were sent back from in a box. They can't even imagine the idea of getting on a boat, or a train, and watching land flash by, and stepping out on the ground there. Seeing the field hospitals with their floors running red and knee deep in men without arms or legs. Incomplete men, puzzle men, missing pieces here and there under their stained bandages and somehow still breathing. Hearing the distant thud-thud-thud of the guns and realizing that the smoke is so thick you can't see the sun.

Such things aren't real to them, anymore.

The grass has grown over the fields now. The sky is blue. The sun shines. There are forests, and birds, and the rain comes down as it has for thousands of years. The air is clean.

There are jokes about the French and their wars. There are jokes about the British and their sensibilities. There are clichés about Germany, and Russia, and all of Europe, and the men and women who were there. In time there will be new clichés about tanks, and submarines, and Spitfires, and air craft carriers and destroyers and D Day and Normandy and the atomic bombs.

The trenches came first.

Crowley had been there. Ordered there, while the angel waited in London, and while Aziraphale worked to the best of his ability to provide miracles as Heaven dictated (and sometimes as Heaven didn't), Crowley didn't have to lift a finger to meet his quotas. Men died all around him cursing God without him ever saying a word.

And the ones who prayed at the end, the ones he should have, by his very nature, taken the time to prolong their deaths or otherwise interrupt their activities, he left alone. Or killed quickly, if that was what they were praying for.

There were other things he did, too. Things that Hell didn't and couldn't know about, although he thought resentfully how stupid it was to get shirty about one man or two or a squad miraculously surviving or getting sent home when there were millions migrating Above and Below at the same time.

With that line of reasoning, though, Crowley had to wonder why he bothered with that one man or two or the squad. Or maybe he wasn't really wondering. The rational part of his brain wondered. Something inside him already knew why.

He died accidentally a few times. Deliberately a few times, too. Walked out of a trench to field an incoming shell with his face, smiling at it, or taking off his mask to inhale deeply of the gas filling the air. Demons simply didn't have suicidal tendencies, simply couldn't _be_ depressed, or any other number of things, so Hell just grumbled about the paperwork involving in requisitioning physical bodies and reprimanded Crowley for his carelessness.

There had been a time when massacres didn't affect Crowley at all. The wars of the past, the mass slaughters, the persecutions and the cleansings, some of them he'd watched unblinkingly or participated in, willingly or unwillingly. He used to fight with the angel all the time, back when the world was younger. They used to regularly destroy mountains and other prominent aspects of the scenery, doing their respective duties when it came to confronting agents of the Enemy with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Aziraphale had lost more often than he won, or at least suffered more during the process of combat due to Crowley's tendency to shift back and forth between human and snake. He still complained to Crowley how much those poison filled bites had _stung._ Getting decapitated or cleaved in half by a flaming sword was mild in comparison. That, at least, could only happen once during a fight.

Crowley only believed the angel's indignant recalling of 97 bite marks _and_ both wings stripped because angels weren't supposed to lie.

He blamed his own laziness for the cessation of physical hostilities which had, eventually, led to the Arrangement. Not that he felt bad about it in the slightest. The other side of laziness was efficiency. And it was nice not having to muster up the enthusiasm and energy to thrash Aziraphale whenever they saw each other, because there were definitely more productive things Crowley could do with his time and some days he really just didn't feel like acting out Hell's moron orders that, like any order that comes from the top, often were more sound in theory than in practice. He certainly couldn't be out tempting people and doing the rest of his job if he was consistently concentrating on tearing the angel's throat out every other day, now could he?

It bothered him that humans, so generally lazy and touting efficiency as their motto of progress, hadn't yet figured out how to apply the same principle to war, other than coming up with _efficient_ ways of killing each other. Their mortal lives were brief enough that they really, really, really ought to have better things to do with their time.

Crowley came back to Aziraphale complaining of all this, and Aziraphale pretended that it didn't strike a terrible chord in him to see the demon after his time on the front. The face was the same. The eyes were the same. But the words, especially the careless, drunken ones were different, and Crowley was different somehow, and the change would haunt the angel for years afterwards.

Living so closely among humans, day in and day out, had ingrained a few of their more conspicuous habits into Crowley. He slept at night, though he'd done that before, but now he slept badly. Mornings were matters of profound, vicious resentment.

Aziraphale suffered his first hangover in over a thousand years one night, forgetting to will the liquor from his system before it did damage, watching a passed out Crowley mutter and writhe and even cry out in his alcohol induced sleep.

Demons were not supposed to have nightmares.

Nor were they supposed to experience shellshock, or trauma, or flashbacks, or any of the other human terms that could be applied to survivors of the Great War. Aziraphale didn't know what had been so different this time, in this conflict, to leave the impressions it did. Crowley didn't know himself. Nor did Crowley have any good explanations for the secrets dragged out of him by an astonished angel, confessions about against all odds rescues and fatally wounded men surviving until a doctor could be found and bizarre circumstances calling whole platoons off the front.

"You should have asked me to come," Aziraphale said dazedly, not really hearing what he was saying while his mind tried to reconcile what he'd just been told with how …well, with how things were supposed to be. "Miracles are the business of angels. I could have…"

"I didn't want you to," Crowley interrupted miserably, and then stalked out without another word, leaving the angel to stare speechlessly after him.

The Second World War swept them up before long. Crowley was ordered back to the front. Aziraphale tried to bury the insistent feeling of dread that kept creeping in from the back of his mind, where he always shoved inconvenient things that he didn't like to think about.

It's just a mortal conflict. Humans disagreeing and fighting and dying, as they've been doing since the world began.

Nothing more than that.

He saw Crowley off this time, although the demon had deliberately not mentioned when his train was leaving. Pushing through the crowds of waving, crying families, searching for a familiar set of shoulders under uniform out of hundreds of other uniforms. He was trying not to think of how many of these would suffer horribly, trying not to think about Crowley trying not to think the same thing standing next to them, because Crowley would be the one there with them when it happened. Heaven wanted Aziraphale to stay where he was. He could only assume there were other angelic agents being sent to the battlefields, because Crowley couldn't work all the miracles on his rebellious own….

"Crowley!" he yelled, catching sight of a familiar flash of tinted glasses. Soldiers couldn't wear sunglasses, so Crowley's were proper eyeglasses that would conveniently darken over time.

The demon turned, a look of blank surprise on his face. The slump of his shoulders matched the one he'd come back with after the mess (and you could call it that now, looking back) at Versailles.

"What are you --" he started, before cutting off with a shocked squeak and having to drop his bags to catch the angel that had just thrown himself into his arms.

Aziraphale really hadn't intended to do that, but now that it was done, he plunged on recklessly. "Whatever you do out there, be careful. Please be careful."

"……you're drunk, angel. Or raving." Crowley wondered if he'd already gotten on the train and had fallen asleep, and was just dreaming this happening.

"Shut up, dear boy," Aziraphale said sternly, and kissed the demon before his better judgment and sanity could catch up with him.

All humans in the vicinity suddenly felt a powerful urge to look anywhere but at a certain corner of a crowded train platform.

To his distinct disgust, Crowley realized that his legs were going to give way if they kept this up any longer, and so was forced to pull back first. He tried to say something, failed, tried again, and failed again.

Aziraphale was so pale it might have been unhealthy. That quickly changed into a flaming blush as Crowley continued to stare without speaking. They hadn't yet let go of each other.

"I…" Crowley began, and then swore loudly when the train whistle shrieked. "Aziraphale…"

"I'll be right here when you get back," Aziraphale said, the words breathless and forced as though he'd just run a marathon. "I'll wait for you."

Crowley took the kiss to him this time, tilting the angel's head back with the force of it, and everything he didn't say was perfectly understood anyway.

The whistle blew a final time. The crowd milled, wives and mothers crying and calling to their sons, fathers watching their children go off to war, little brothers and sisters waving flags and flowers. Lovers pressed their last kisses. Devotions were declared and promises exchanged. They knew and hoped against the reality that so many of these vows would be broken, that so many of them would never make it home.

Crowley did, eventually. And Aziraphale was there standing on the platform waiting for him.


End file.
